Thirty-five years ago this week I started my job as travel editor of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel (then the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel). I would hold the job for the next 19 years, visiting parts of the world – the Caribbean, South America, Asia, Australia – I had never been to before. In 2003 I published a book, A Way to See the World, comprised of stories I’d written for the paper (possibly the last collection of newspaper travel stories ever published). The Sun-Sentinel’s name appeared – either with selected stories or under “Notables” in the back – in the first nine editions of The Best American Travel Writing. The anthology, which debuted in 2000, was discontinued after 2021.
Catching up on my reading, I came across Richard Brody’s review in The New Yorker of Kevin Costner’s new western Horizon: An American Saga, and was struck by the critic’s description of one of the characters as a “sex worker.” It made me wonder if the saloon had a mixologist.
I’ve been back from Poland for over a week now, but most of the time has been spent in bed with the bronchitis I picked up in Krakow. I started coughing the day the Olympics opened in Paris, which meant that for the first two weeks of my illness I was able to watch the greatest athletes in the world compete in the most beautiful city in the world. (It was interesting, also, seeing the games from another country’s perspective – lots of brave interviews with people heading home without medals.) Since returning to Florida, I have been watching tennis (now on hiatus until the U.S. Open next week), the Little League World Series, and – starting last night – the Democratic National Convention. Last week, in another instance of good timing, the New Yorker’s special humor issue arrived. Meanwhile, I’m hearing that some types of bronchitis last six to eight weeks, which would take me past the U.S. Open finals and well into the start of football season.
A standard question in the New York Times Book Review’s weekly author interview is: “You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?”
Most writers play along; a few dodge the question by claiming they don’t cook or like to socialize. Yesterday, Joy Williams wrote: “This is not a time for dinner parties! Serene consumption, self-treasuring and holding forth will not heal our stricken earth.” She went on for another couple sentences.
Now I’m awaiting the writer who, when asked by the Times which three writers they’d invite to a literary dinner party, responds, “Not Joy Williams.”
I’m off to Poland tonight – will be back here the middle of August.
October is Polish American Heritage Month and I have been using that peg to try to set up readings of my memoir at bookstores, a few of which boast of their support of the marginalized and the underrepresented. In American publishing, few groups are as poorly represented as the Poles. Yet I am finding that not all marginalized groups are equal; some, in fact, are not even regarded as marginalized.
A friend recently sent me one of those surveys of countries, this one ranking them in order of kindness to strangers. Japan came in last, just below Poland. The countries where I’ve felt the most welcome – Vietnam and Turkey – were not on the list, nor was China. There’s a word in Chinese, which I don’t remember, for the circle of family and friends who are important to you; anyone who falls outside it is not worth your attention, let alone concern. You can understand it, sort of, in a country with such a huge population. Poland has a little of that – a leftover, ironically, from Communism perhaps; Poles don’t generally talk to strangers, which I find infuriating. But they should get some points for taking in over a million Ukrainians.